Infrastructure and Connectivity in the Middle East
Panel 017, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 16 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed massive construction of modern infrastructure that established new and increasingly convenient connections among places in the Middle East. In their designs of asphalt roads, railways, and canals, European engineers remade the local topography with an unprecedented vision. Mountains, rivers, isthmus—sites that had previously been known as natural barriers—were conquered by technological inventions. The infrastructural transformations of the geographical and social landscapes marked the triumph of human capacity in the elimination of spatial remoteness and isolation, and subsequently confirmed a series of interconnected ideas of the modern age, including efficiency, rationality, and progress.
The panel revisits and critiques these techno-modernist ideas and their practices in three places during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Anatolia, Egypt, and Palestine. Asphalt roads, railways, and canals indeed contributed to a more efficient and reliable global and regional communications of personnel and goods, allowing modern forms of governance, economic growth, and human interaction. However, these infrastructure projects also created new disconnections between government authorities and local residents, capitalists and the working class, the foreign and the local. The panel starts from dissecting the formation of a techno-modernist discourse that delineated new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, empowerment and disempowerment. Through the enforcement of infrastructure projects, these boundaries were concretized into everyday language and practices, and set up new social norms in the contexts of old and new forms of empires. Modern infrastructure, consequently, manifested both connections and disconnections.
The panelists work on locating sites of both conflicts and mediations within the social surroundings of the infrastructure projects. In intellectual debates, social movements, practices of everyday life, the panel traces actors and agents who engaged in the infrastructural networks, and analyzes their positions and interactions within the social structures organized around the infrastructure. By zeroing in on their intentions, articulations, and actions, the panelists examine how these actors perceived their (dis)connectivity to the infrastructural networks, their visions for the past and the future, and how they carried individual visions into practices that influenced the development of the infrastructure. Each paper will focus on a demarcated group of people, ranging from European scientists and engineers, local intellectuals, to ordinary residents, both native and foreign. The panel, in general, will reveal the multiple façades of transformations beyond the techno-modernist interpretations of large-scale infrastructure projects, and will provide alternatives for understanding individual subjectivity, the society, and nationhood in various contexts of empire, colony, and nation state.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Juan Cole
-- Discussant, Chair
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Dr. Alex Schweig
-- Presenter
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Dr. Lucia Carminati
-- Presenter
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Prof. Xiaoyue Li
-- Presenter
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Mr. Omer Sharir
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Mr. Omer Sharir
This paper applies an infrastructural approach to the construction of a new settler-colonial racial order in Palestine in the aftermath of World War I. It treats motorized mobility, with its supporting infrastructure of paved roads, as a key mechanism by which new subject-positions and modes of collective action were introduced into the Palestinian social landscape.
The system of roads in existence in Palestine before the war reflected an animal-powered mobility regime. The war severely disrupted this regime, leaving in its wake massive numbers of human and animal casualties. It also brought a new form of transportation to the Palestinian landscape - motorized vehicles, mostly military ones at first but increasingly civilians ones as well. The paper begins by delineating the different combinations of private and public enterprises that emerged in order to facilitate the domestication of motorized transportation. It tracks particular material assemblages as they pass between military and civilian usage, as when military vehicles were repurposed to serve as the foundation of a fledgling public transportation system.
Yet the encounter between motorized vehicles and unpaved roads quickly marked the latter as inadequate, producing frequent stoppages and breakages. The British colonial state thus enrolled itself in a large scale project of road construction. However, the strict financial constraints under which the colonial state operated limited its ability to enact its technopolitical vision. Starting from the early 1920’s, British officers began relying on the coerced labor of Palestinian prisoners for road-construction. Other state-led ventures employed the cheap contracted labour of Arab villagers and itinerant workers, particularly women and children. A 1926 ordinance provided a legal framework for the coercion of whole Arab rural communities into road-construction work. The Jewish settlement movement, on the other hand, was able to enact semi-private road construction ventures using private capital flows. Through consecutive financial crises of the 1920’s, these ventures provided much-needed wage labor to the swelling ranks of Eastern European immigrants, and served as key sites for their incorporation into the centralized organizational structure of the Yishuv.
These divergent mechanisms of road construction help explain the spatial extent of the road system in Palestine by the late 1920’s. The paper concludes a discussion of the utility of the term “infrastructural violence.” It argues that such violence should be seen as taking place within a shared repertoire alongside more spectacular forms of communal violence, illustrating this point with evidence from the anti-Jewish riots of 1929.
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Dr. Lucia Carminati
In April of 1859, one hundred and fifty laborers gathered on Egypt's northern shore. When pickaxes first hit the land to be parted from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, not only was the Suez Canal initiated, but the coastal city of Port Said was born as well. Two more cities, Ismailia (1862) and Terreplein/Port Tewfik (1867), were later founded along the waterway. As water and greenery advanced, the desert supposedly receded. As cities surged from the sand, civilization conquered uncivilized wastelands. Tens of thousands laborers migrated to the Isthmus in search of work and found employment in a number of different professional fields.
This paper analyzes the ways in which the environment of the isthmus of Suez changed upon the digging of the canal as well as the ideas that germinated about such changes. It approaches the isthmus of Suez as not "just a place," but also as an arena in which conflicting ideologies about space came at odds with each other. At first, I examine the earliest schemes about the realization of a water-way cutting through from the Mediterranean to the Red sea. Then, I proceed to analyze the difficult gestation of the city of Port Said. Afterwards, I adopt comparative perspectives to present the parallel development of Port Said and Ismailia. I identify the similarities and the ruptures of their shared history. Finally, I incorporate the perspectives of migrant laborers themselves to describe their lives in the quickly evolving desert.
By relying on published memoirs, travel accounts, and archival documents gathered in my multi-sited fieldwork, I explore how Western contemporaries viewed the isthmus desert and constructed narratives around the urbanization and the peopling of the area. I argue that they sanctioned the myth that Western initiative alone could transform the isthmus sands into flower gardens, thus disregarding realities on the ground: labor movements and environmental challenges.
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Dr. Alex Schweig
The construction of the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad in the early 1890s extended the infrastructure of European economic and cultural penetration to the Anatolian interior. There was a sharp Ottoman awareness of this German-built railroad as a foreign project, and locals along its route would sometimes refer to it as a “European train” or “the infidel’s train.” While Europeans did use the railroad for their own commercial and political gains, this does not completely justify the characterization of the railroad as a foreign element, nor of the Europeans who came with it into provincial Anatolia as mere foreign agents (although many were that too). This paper examines long-term foreign residents in the Northwest Anatolian town of Eskisehir, a crucial railroad junction, and argues that it is impossible to make a pure dichotomy between foreign and local actors. These foreigners, mainly Europeans, included railroad workers and managers, as well as others whose work was often indirectly tied to the railroad, such as the proprietors and managers of some of Eskisehir’s earliest European-style hotels, instructors at the railroad school, which was established for the families of European workers, these workers’ families themselves, missionaries, and others. Through an examination of a variety of sources, including Ottoman archival documents, travel narratives and memoirs of both Europeans and Ottoman subjects, and Ottoman newspapers, I trace some of these long-term residents, and attempt to determine their positions within local social structures in a way that goes beyond the local-foreign dichotomy. These foreigners with deep local ties include Madame Tadia, a locally- well known Czech woman who was a hotelier for 30 years, stayed through World War I and lodged Atatürk’s National Forces during the Turkish War of Independence, a German widow who made extensive charitable contributions to the city’s poor, the high-society wife of a local Christian mining magnate, and others. By challenging the notions of the foreign- local dichotomy, I portray a city in a period of transformation, a transformation being realized through the negotiation between foreign and local elements, a negotiation for which resident Europeans were more intermediaries than belonging purely to one side or the other.
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Prof. Xiaoyue Li
Railways have fundamentally transformed Egyptian landscapes since its initial construction in 1851. Railway allowed faster communication among separated places and reduced discomfort of long-distance traveling. For many contemporary witnesses, railways functioned as an idealized carrier and ultimate embodiment of modernity, providing a confirmation of technological change and progress that started to re-organize the everyday life of people living in Egypt. However, railways also crystalized the lopsidedness of development between the imperial center and colonial Egypt. With the Alexandria Port as the ultimate destination of most freight trains, railways connected domestic market and international trade with much more efficiency and reliability, paving way for the rapid expansion of global capitalism at the expense of local handicraft industries, and furthermore direct colonial rule encroaching the sovereignty of Egypt. Railways, therefore, was accompanied by, if not give rise to, three major transformations during the second half of the nineteenth century: modernization, de-industrialization, and colonialization.
My research will zero in on Egyptian technocrats and intellectuals in their critical reflections on railways from 1870 till 1919. Gradual yet steady localization of railway technology created groups of Egyptians including state officials, engineers, public intellectuals, and railway hobbyists, who worked on or attended special attention to the rail system. Trained in new schools of engineering and liberal arts, this batch of ambitious intellectuals embarked on a determined process of modernization, and work to integrate European science and technology with circumstances of the Egyptian society. They were eager to participate in everyday railway operations, translate railway-related knowledge, and promote railways to a wider pool of audiences. Railways, in other words, encapsulated their ambition of creating a modern Egypt. Meanwhile, these intellectuals were not unaware of the unequal relation between Egypt and Europe, embodied in the priority of the British in taking railway travel, unfavorable restrictions of technology transfer, and afterwards strictly hierarchical railway administration in the high tide of colonialism. In response to these situations, my question will focus on how these intellectuals analyzed possible impact of railways on the local economy; how they thought about railways and national sovereignty; what they proposed to reverse the relative disadvantage of Egypt within the colonial world order. In answering these questions, I will reveal multiplicities of debates among Egyptian intellectuals revolving railways, which eventually burst out into the tumultuous upsurge of anti-colonial nationalism in 1919.
